The Origins of Weird State Park Names (Part One)

My brother sent me this screenshot of Trip Advisor's information on Moses Lake, Washington. A friend had noted the "Top-rated things to do" section and found it particularly depressing. I'm sure that Potholes State Park and the House of Poverty Museum are perfectly wonderful things to see, but the names aren't exactly inspiring.

I started to wonder if there were other state parks with equally depressing names. After all, Badlands National Park in South Dakota would sound like a place you'd want to run from, if you didn't already know that "Badlands" was a name given to an area that was hard to travel through, only before we built roads.

Potholes State Park was named for nearby Potholes Reservoir, which in turn was named for the local term for several small lakes that were created by glacial action during the Pleistocene era and then dammed to create reservoirs as part of the Columbia Basin Project for irrigation purposes. Other state parks were much bigger head-scratchers.

Negro Bar State Park near Folsom, California makes your eyebrows fly up and you say to yourself, "What were they thinking?" Negro Bar is a historical site, but not the segregated tavern it sounds like. It was a tiny mining camp that sprung up during the Gold Rush of 1849, situated on a sand bar, near mines first worked by a few African-American miners. Those first miners moved on to better gold fields by 1852, and new miners of various origins moved in. But the name remained.

Possum Kingdom State Park in Texas is named after Possum Kingdom Lake, which was named by Russian immigrant Ike Sablosky. Sablosky came to the Mineral Wells, Texas to drink the water and cure his stomach problems. He was a fur trapping magnate who made a fortune in opossum pelts; there were so many of the critters that he called the area the Possum Kingdom.

Two Creeks Buried State Forest in Wisconsin is a grammatical puzzle. What is buried: the creeks, the state, or the forest? A little digging (haha) revealed that it is the forest that is buried. Trees are not growing underground, but geological evidence shows that a forest existed between 11,000 and 19,000 years ago. Glaciers advanced and retreated over the area several times since then, each time leaving more sediment that buried the forest.

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Miss Cellania has written for mental_floss since 2007. She is also the managing editor at Neatorama and keeps a small humor blog called Miss Cellania. In her spare time, she is raising a frightening number of children in a small Kentucky town.